TORONTO – To mark its 25th anniversary, the Hubble Space Telescope has revisited its most iconic image — the “Pillars of Creation” — to produce a jaw-dropping high-definition image that peers into the heart of a nebula.
The original image was first captured by Hubble in 1995. To fully appreciate this new, incredible photograph, click here for a larger version.
And instead of giving you the technical, nitty-gritty scientific details, let’s put this image in perspective.
First, the nebula — called the Eagle Nebula or Messier 16 — is about 6,500 light-years away, which means we’re looking back in time. So far back, in fact, that it’s about 5,000 B.C.E. and beer-brewing has just been developed here on Earth.
And this is more than just a pretty photograph — it’s a stellar nursery. The clouds of gas are actually making new stars. Near the top you can see bits of matter that have broken away from the pillar. In time — a very long time — that “little” clump will likely form a star and possibly planets (it all depends on whether or not those globules have enough gas and gravity to collapse).
There are other wavelengths such as infrared, near-infrared and x-ray which can see other things unseen in visible light. So Hubble used near-infrared which penetrates the dust, giving astronomers a better glimpse inside the cloud and uncovering newly formed stars.
Though it’s been dubbed the “Pillars of Creation” astronomers also note that the new image illustrates the destructive forces with the cloud. Some of the edges of the pillars are being heated by stellar radiation and evaporating into space. Out of frame is a star cluster. Its ionizing winds have blown away the gas between the pillars.
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Messier 16 is roughly 70 light-years by 50-light years. That means if you could travel at the speed of light (299,792 kilometres per second), it would take you 70 years to travel from top to bottom. The nebula itself is estimated to be 5.5 million years old.
Scientists have compared the two images, taken 19 years apart, and found that a jet-like structure has expanded 96 billion kilometres. Do the calculations and you’ll find that that means winds in the region are moving about 724,000 kilometres an hour.
When you look at this beautiful, awe-inspiring image, just stop and think: our sun, our planet, our solar system formed out of a similar cloud of dust and gas. Perhaps somewhere across our galaxy, someone else is looking back 4.5 billion years ago and watching as we were born.
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